Isham Cook
Popular historian and a fun read on an episode of history that's essential for US students. Unforgettable tidbits on Lewis and Clark's sex hospitality encounters by certain Indian tribes (Google the term).
This was hard when I read it 4 decades ago; I understood nothing. You need to be steeped in this stuff to appreciate it.
This famous novel is one of the few to boast of having launched a movement, however perverse a one: causing countless young European men to shoot themselves in the head over unrequited love in imitation of the luckless protagonist. You don't think books are important?
This book floored me when I first discovered it in City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco in 1988. Written in Paris cafes in the revolutionary fervor of the late '60s, the breathless rhetoric may sound dated today but I wish I had been a part of that era.
The third indispensable Situationist text after Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem's Revolution of Everyday Life.
Classic Situationist text to be paired with the more compelling and readable Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life.
One wants to know what all the fuss is about until it begins to dawn on the reader the shocking truth of what is going on, revealed layer by delicate layer.
The book needs no hype; it remains one of the two founding dystopian novels - the other being Huxley's Brave New World. However, since reading Barbara Demick's “Nothing to Envy,” about life in North Korea, I have to say that that country surpasses “1984” in horror and moreover actually exists.
A classic “difficult” novel, concise though it is, but required reading for students of literature who wish to break out of their genre-fiction blinders.
Classic Chomskey text, but go back earlier to The Political Economy of Human Rights for an even more forceful and urgent tome by the same authors.
This slim volume was hard for me to understand when first introduced to Foucault in Lauren Berlant's literary crit class at U Chicago back in ‘83, but the thesis was momentous: sex, far from being repressed, is ever discursively exploited as a form of power.
Now considered a modern classic and a reference text for the polyamory movement, showing that the urge to engage sexually with multiple people is both natural and grounded in nature.
Used to collect each volume religiously before the internet opened up much more information on classic music recordings. The authors' succinct and authoritative, if somewhat fussy, but also often generous, summaries still resonate and influence, however.